Michael Lloyd/The OregonianPatrick deWitt wrote "The Sisters Brothers." He's the kind of writer who's drawn to dark places and is surprised when it turns out he's a natural comic. He's at work on a new novel.

Patrick deWitt found a Time-Life book for 25 cents at a yard sale in Northeast Portland that inspired him to write "The Sisters Brothers," a novel that won two national awards in Canada and was a finalist for the Booker Prize, arguably the most important fiction contest in the world.

The Time-Life book is called "The Forty-Niners," and is about the California gold rush. DeWitt was so fascinated by it that he set his novel about two murderous brothers who travel from Oregon City to San Francisco in 1851, after the first wave of gold fever hit the West, and included descriptions of old photographs from the Time-Life book in "The Sisters Brothers." He still has his cut-up copy of "The Forty-Niners" and holds it like a talisman in his study.

How lucky is that, finding something so vital for a quarter a few blocks from your house? Discovering the key that will unlock creativity's door in a neighbor's yard is like a miner tripping over a huge nugget of gold in a stream. It happens, but not very often. It's luck, but it's not random.

"The theme of luck comes up a lot," deWitt says. "It's something I thought about before, why some people are lucky and some people aren't lucky. It seems like some people you meet can sort of cultivate luck, and I've always been fascinated by that."

DeWitt thinks you can't bluff your way into luck, that it must be earned. He likes a quote by Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire": "You know what luck is? Luck is believing you're lucky, that's all ... To hold a front position in this rat-race, you've got to believe you are lucky."

Novelist Patrick deWitt writes at home.Writer Patrick deWitt finds his muse in his home office where he wrote his acclaimed novel, "The Sisters Brothers." He credits an old Time/LIFE Book, "The Forty-Niners," as inspiring his novel.

There's more to it than that. A high-school dropout who never took a writing course or went to college doesn't just stumble on a discarded history book and write a prize-winning novel. What at first seems like an unlikely background for a rising literary star -- deWitt worked construction for his father and spent six years washing dishes in a Hollywood bar -- turns out to be a necessary apprenticeship. At 36, deWitt has two critically acclaimed novels and a screenplay for the independent movie "Terri" to his credit, and he's just getting warmed up. His new novel is well under way, and screenwriting was so much fun that he's sure to try it again. For someone who says he writes only a few hours each day and knew he loathed working on the first shift of his first job, deWitt is getting a lot done.

"Patrick is one of the hardest workers I know," said Azazel Jacobs, the director of "Terri" and one of deWitt's first readers. "I recognize the same thing in myself. We're not going to wait until someone tells us not to do it. We grew up attracted to punk rock and had that ethic of we're just gonna push forward and do it."

"I have a record problem," deWitt says, stepping away from the turntable in his living room. "Orchestre Regional de Mopti," a 1970 recording from Mali that was reissued by Mississippi Records of Portland, is playing. Behind it in a stack are albums by Don Cherry, Black Sabbath, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Bob Dylan and dozens of others, and in the study there are hundreds more along with a painting by the late Oregon guitarist John Fahey. DeWitt doesn't have much use for CDs and loves vinyl records for their sound and as physical objects. He can't resist when he sees something he likes.

"It's healthy to have interests besides books," he says, and smiles.

DeWitt's house is comfortable, with picture windows in the living room and the study, and he's comfortable in it. Lanky and low-key, deWitt has "thank you" tattooed on one of his palms and is articulate and guarded, the kind of writer who's drawn to dark places and is surprised when it turns out he's a natural comic. His wife, Leslie Napoles, is a screenwriter who's writing at a coffee shop nearby. Their son Gustavo is making notes for his screenplay while attending first grade.

DeWitt starts his writing day after walking Gustavo to Vernon School. He goes into his study, shuts the door and gets busy.

"The nice thing about writing at home is that it's almost as though I'm doing it already," deWitt says. "I get out of bed thinking of my work, and I don't have to go anywhere to do it."

DeWitt was born in Sidney, B.C., in 1975, and bounced between Canada and Southern California with his parents and two brothers for much of his childhood. Being the middle brother, "the tormentor and the tormented," helped give him empathy for Charlie and Eli, the Sisters brothers, and Canadian citizenship has helped with grants and recognition for his writing. "The Sisters Brothers" won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, two of the three big literary awards in Canada, and was a finalist for the Booker Prize, open to citizens of the British Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe.

MICHAEL LLOYD/THE OREGONIANPatrick deWitt works on his new novel in his Northeast Portland home.

DeWitt said moving back and forth between countries was "annoying, disruptive to our childhood." It did help bond him to his brothers, who received an artistic grounding from a father who wrote short stories and a mother who took photographs. Mike deWitt, the oldest brother, has a record label called Teenage Teardrops that puts out limited-edition vinyl, including music by the youngest brother, Nick deWitt.

"As far as all three of us pursuing an artistic path, I think the fact that our parents surrounded us with books and music had something to do with it," Mike deWitt says. "When you're 8 years old and you've become subconsciously familiar with the layout and design of Black Sparrow books, and you know the difference between Miles Davis and John Coltrane, something is bound to stick."

Patrick deWitt was quiet, a loner even in a group, his brother Mike says, and he hated school. He did like the punk scene in Southern California and tried to do a zine about it with a friend.

"It never came out because we were slackers," he says. "I was reading grown-up books by the time I was 14 or 15, and it was inevitable that I would give writing a whirl. I couldn't imagine writing for a living, but by time I was 17 I decided I would try and write novels."

First he read them. After dropping out of high school in Southern California, deWitt moved back to Canada and spent his days hanging out in the Vancouver public library. He would check out seven or eight books, read a paragraph or two, and decide if he wanted to keep going. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hubert Selby Jr. and Charles Portis made the cut. Portis he read and reread many times, and years later when people compared "The Sisters Brothers" to the Coen brothers, deWitt knew they really meant Portis' novel "True Grit," not the movie. DeWitt did a little day labor in Vancouver building sets for movies and working the kind of jobs where if he said he had a high school diploma, no one bothered to check.

"I felt really liberated, being able to study on my own," deWitt says. "I looked at school as an antiquated system that I had no use for."

DeWitt spent six years working at a bar in Hollywood, an experience that was the basis for "Ablutions: Notes for a Novel." His publisher asked him not to say the name of the bar in interviews, and it's not hard to see why.

"It was one of those bars where the managers drank," he says. "You would walk in and they would pour you a drink first thing. We all drank together all night long. As long as you could maintain and not pass out you were never reprimanded."

It paid well and seemed like great fun at first. DeWitt started as a bar back, a dishwasher and bartender's assistant who changed taps, chopped fruit and poured a few drinks. "Not the most ambitious employee," he says. He ended as a bar back, working in a place that could be quiet on weeknights ("filled with hardened welfare cases") and busy on weekends ("full of glitzy obnoxious wealthy people").

At work deWitt would write notes to himself in second-person that became the basis for "Ablutions." Sometimes they would be directed to himself: "You fall in love with Jameson Irish whiskey." Sometimes they would be reminders about other people: "Discuss the new doorman, Antony, who at the end of his third night on the job accidentally cuts a man's thumb off." The second-person narrative gives "Ablutions" the raw immediacy of a memoir and an unusual structure that is off-putting to some and magical to others.

One patron who liked the manuscript was Matt Sweeney, who has played guitar with Neil Diamond and Kid Rock, and who helped deWitt find his agent. Another was Jacobs, the director whose girlfriend (now wife) was friends with deWitt's girlfriend (now wife). In Hollywood, everyone claims to make movies or write something. Once Jacobs and deWitt realized neither one was fronting, their relationship took off. Jacobs shot a scene from his movie "TheGoodTimesKid" in the bar and used deWitt as the bartender; deWitt showed Jacobs some unpublished writing that eventually and after much discussion became the screenplay for "Terri." The movie stars John C. Reilly, who bought the screen rights to "The Sisters Brothers" after Jacobs gave him the manuscript and plans to star as Eli Sisters.

The experience at the bar didn't end well, and after Gustavo was born deWitt and Napoles left Los Angeles. They lived with his parents in Washington state while he worked construction and finished "Ablutions." It was published in 2009 and got some good reviews but never found an audience, nothing like "The Sisters Brothers."

When "The Sisters Brothers" made the Booker Prize long list of 13 semifinalists, deWitt didn't know much about the prize. He soon found out, and when his novel was picked as one of six finalists in September, the pace picked up. Sales in the U.K. quadrupled, and he made six trips to Canada in two months for award ceremonies and promotion. Now he's back in Portland, listening to "Mingus Plays Piano" and thinking about what will happen next month, when he leaves with his family for a literary residency in France. They'll come back to Portland, he's sure of it, but it's the end of their time in this house and this neighborhood.

"The Sisters Brothers" was the first Western to make the shortlist in the 43-year history of the Booker Prize, and even though deWitt never expected to win and wasn't surprised he lost to the heavy favorite, Julian Barnes' "The Sense of an Ending," he was in suspense before the winner was announced.

"You can't help it," he says. "You're in a suit and ready. The moments leading up to it were very exciting, you know?"

There's an element of luck involved.

"The thing, too, about writing is it has a quality of ... you know there's an expectant quality where you're sitting there waiting for something to come into the room that wasn't there a moment ago," deWitt says. "Some days they just come through all morning long. It's like a barrage. Other days it's really sparse, where the ideas are all bad ideas. But the mercuriality of it is fascinating to me. If you've ever gambled -- sometimes you feel lucky and you are lucky. It's sort of a self-fulfilling thing. But of course it's always very fleeting. And that's what makes it interesting to me."

DeWitt reads from "The Sisters Brothers" at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 19 at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St.